Where Tech Meets Geopolitics

Hello Beautiful Reader,

“Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker,” wrote Emmanuel Goldstein in Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600. Adaptability is a function of knowledge acquisition; as you read more top tech perspectives, you’ll form your own new perspectives about technology. We have some stories today that just may change your perspective on the technology industry.

I have a couple of company initiatives to share, and then we’ll jump into the top ten tech stories of the week. So if you’re a purist for the story itself, take a sip of coffee and scroll down to our top stories. As a reminder, you can always find a story in our January archives, where we order stories by most read of the day.

Want to write an open letter to the leaders of tech?

Voices change industries. When one of our contributing writers forwarded me an email from Elon Musk, saying he appreciated the thoughtful analysis of his Hacker Noon story, I thought, maybe this is an activity we can encourage... Open Letters are a way to scale this activity. Providing distribution to unheralded voices has been part of DNA since day 1. We want to get well-written and persuasive open letters in front of the eyes of many — including the person they’re addressed to. We’ve built a page to house these letters, Open Letters to The Titans of Tech, and will be giving distribution priority to high quality open letters. Please email a draft of your Open Letter to a Titan of Tech to Stories@AMiPublications.com.

INTERNATIONAL BLOCKCHAIN STORY OF THE WEEK: The 3 most promising public blockchain projects from China for 2018by cryptweeter. As decentralization underlines the the strength of the blockchain, it seems a little silly to to divide projects by country… but aren’t you curious…. what are the biggest blockchain projects from China? The author makes arguments for VeChain, Matrix and Nebulas as 3 blockchain projects that will grow considerably in 2018.

TECH INNOVATION IRL STORY OF THE WEEK: I experienced the future of retail: Amazon Go by Geek on record. I haven’t had the opportunity to visit the new Amazon Go store myself, but this story about the experience in Seattle’s inaugural store is the next best thing. No checkout lines! What a powerful idea. Spoiler alert: when the author left the store, the digital receipt confirmed he had been billed correctly.